Thursday, December 29, 2022

Top 10 books about the Iron Curtain

Timothy Phillips is the author of The Secret Twenties: British Intelligence, the Russians, and the Jazz Age (2017) and Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1 (2008). He grew up in Northern Ireland and now lives in London. He holds a doctorate in Russian from Oxford University and has written and spoken widely on British and Russian history.

Phillips's new book is The Curtain and the Wall: A Modern Journey along Europe’s Cold War Border [US title: Retracing the Iron Curtain: A 3,000-Mile Journey Through the End and Afterlife of the Cold War].

At the Guardian he tagged ten "books that reveal the essence of the most menacing border the world has yet seen," including:
Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary and the Crisis That Shook the World by Alex von Tunzelmann

This rare gem focuses on two of the biggest events of the period, the Suez crisis and the Hungarian Revolution. Both reached their culmination at the same time in 1956. More often treated separately, in Von Tunzelmann’s hands the twin crises regain their full geopolitical force. She has an eye for illuminating detail; the action often unfolds hour by hour. It reads like a thriller.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue